UCR and Scientific American

UCR and Scientific American

The UCR Libraries have Scientific American in 3 different formats and online from several different sources, so it can be confusing. Unfortunately we are not able to subscribe to the content at scientificamerican.com for reasons explained at the bottom of the page.

In order to find Scientific American in the Scotty Catalog, one can search for the title Scientific American and limit to periodicals.

Electronic

To access SA electronically, click on Scientific American [electronic resource]. The three sources we have for electronic access to Scientific American are Proquest, Ebsco and as a backup Cornell

Recap

Why we can't subscribe to www.scientificamerican.com

(From the CDL Webpage, Barriers to Licensing)

Nature Publishing Group recently acquired Scientific American from its sister company at the Holtzbrinck group. With this change in management, the cost of UC's online site license would have been more than twice the fee currently charged for systemwide access. It is worth noting that this fee represented a 'discounted' offer: the list price quoted to the CDL was well over five times our current cost. The price of an institutional print subscription also increased more than seven-fold.

There was no plausible justification for raising online licensing fees for Scientific American to such exorbitant levels. As has been pointed out by others (see for example the Open Letter from the Oberlin Group libraries at http://www.oberlingroup.org/open-letter-scientific-american-oberlin-group-library-directors ), pricing a general interest periodical such as Scientific American at such levels is unreasonable and unlikely to be considered a fiscally responsible investment by many libraries.

For this reason, the University of California Libraries unanimously decided to cancel an online license to Scientific American upon expiration of the subscription in May 2010. Campus libraries are happy to work with faculty and students to identify alternative high-quality sources of scientific news reporting and analysis.